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August 23, 2006

Kesher Talk and Benjamin Kirstein go way back

I am very pleased to invite Benjamin Kerstein to post here. (He is not to be confused with another Ben who has posting privileges but has been a bit intimidated by the blogging process, and whose emails I have occasionally posted myself. We should refer to Benjamin Kirstein by something other than "Ben" to avoid confusion in the future. Especially since I do want the other Ben to post!)

Kirstein is one of those bloggers who seems to have been around forever, and indeed the first time I linked to him was in January 2004, at his previous blog Gefen which he launched during the first week of the Iraq war in 2003. That's at least an eon in blog years.

I linked to The Birth of Neo-Zionism? in the course of several posts about Tony Judt's controversial essay declaring Israel an "anachronism" and advocating the chimera of a "bi-national secular state" (no, Richard Cohen's wasn't the first op-ed in a major newspaper to call Israel a mistake). Benjamin's post compared Judt to Benny Morris, who had recently repudiated much of his "post-Zionism," to the consternation of his academic acolytes. It's still a good read, and illustrates what is these days a typical political journey.

Benjamin has written several pieces for Front Page, including My Road to Damascus, his own tale of political transformation, which was inspired by one of my many 2004 posts about Jewish liberals voting for Bush. "My Road to Damascus" is a story of growing up Left in a Boston suburb, and gradually questioning one's assumptions as the cracks in the ideology begin to show.

Benjamin and I have exchanged emails occasionally throughout this time, and I always planned to link to many more of his posts than I got around to. (I think my favorite is his review of "Munich.") So now he can post them himself, and more.

Judith | 08/23/06 at 12:46 AM | Categories: Liberal hawks and friends

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